My friend, Shoaib, and I have started a new blog called New Pundits. The main advantage of NP is that it’s WordPress, which I prefer much more to Blogger. At any rate NP is still very much in it’s infancy. I believe we started BP around Christmas time 2010 so it’s almost years on and still going strong. I’m a very big fan of the UNZ review, which is really becoming a staple of the alternative media scene and there is no reason in my mind why the fledgling Desi Diaspora shouldn’t have something similar to that.
Last night at dinner I was mentioning to some friends that London was now becoming so Asian that segregation is now an entrenched phenomenon. It’s best seen in social groupings of the prime demographic (20’s & 30’s); very few of them are mixed in any real sense. Class has always been a huge determiner in Britain (which school did you go to?) and a friend of mine once told me “Asians can never be upper class.”
Now I remember this statement very distinctly as it was said in a mixture of remorse & bitterness. At the moment I deeply disagreed with the statement but now that I think of it, it is true that the British Asian (Sikh & Hindu community especially) is merging into the middle classes (just as the Muslim community, for the large part the Mirpuri & Tower Hamlet contingents, are floating between the working and reckless classes).
However I’ll end this slight meandering on this note. I know of a Sindhi lady who fell in love with an Englishman in the 40’s and as a result of familial disapproval, eschewed her love and stayed single. She did mention that in those days many Indian girls liked Englishmen because they were so dapper and looked good (obviously in a subcontinent that venerates fairness, Northwest Europeans would have some advantages). However what was interesting to me is that apart from the early generations of the East India Company (mixtures which created the Anglo-Indians) we don’t really think of Europeans and Indians mixing (especially after the British disbarred royal intermarriage in the fear that the Indian Royalty would go the way of the Aga Khan and be fully Europeanised in a few generations).
Perhaps the reason why British Asians stand apart from the class structure is simply because the culture of intermarriage is so weak compared to any other global culture (East Asians embrace it with alacrity and even black population mix in Europe).
